0xCorigis, The Duolingo of Web3

All right, we're live. Welcome one and all. Welcome to the first installment of DevNTell during Season One. Oh yeah. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on. This can be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share with the community. And today, I am excited to introduce to you Drew, who is a master educator and is going to be demonstrating to us his new project, 0xCorigis. Take it away, Drew.

Thank you. So pretty much, thanks for having me. I am Drew, and I built 0xCorigis. Let me share kind of like what it's all about.

Maybe before we begin that, maybe you want to give a brief intro about kind of what you do or who you are and what you do in the Web3 space and what kind of brought you into the DAO? Yeah.

Yeah. So kind of, I came from traditional educational tech, and then I came from Web2. I started doing data and full stack. And what was interesting kind of my background was I was a traveling teacher. And I traveled around kind of like different types of states, Canada, also Mexico, pretty much in like the Americas. And then what happened was I was trying to be kind of a missionary of teaching people any level, any form, pretty much programming and coding. And I didn't expect that because I was more of a—I pretty much became an extreme generalist. And I started giving back to my community. I used to be—I taught elementary school, middle school, high school, I became a professor. I never had a PhD, but I just started just tutoring and helping out other people in the space. What happened was pretty much I started building learning materials in the Web2 space, and then that transitioned a little bit more into Web3 because a lot of people want more knowledge, more materials, and onboarding tools. So that was kind of like the goal. I started going through many hackathons, won some and lost some, just learned, used that for learning, and then started expanding and met really cool people and started thinking like, yeah, I'm going to probably double down on Web3 and try to make maybe educational materials in the future.

Excellent. Love to hear it.

So let me go through this. Everyone can see my screen? Just making sure. Yes, sir. Sweet. So pretty much, the goal of 0xCorigis was to make code cute and informative. And maybe a way to teach your mom, dad, friends, or families what you do in Web3. So that was kind of like the new vision in itself. Kind of like a story, it was to create—I was never, ever thinking of making a company, I was always going to think of just teaching. So I started teaching kids. And what was interesting about kids was that they needed something like some attachment or character. So I chose characters like corgis. And they are actually—corgis means dwarves, and they're builders. They herd, they also herd like dogs that herd like sheep or any other animal as well. And they pretty much have short legs. If you've ever seen pictures of corgis, they're pretty kind of derpy, but they're very fast. So I started creating characters because some of the younger students that I had were fanatics about it. So I really wanted to research on the animal, but also thought more into like maybe make a coding corgi, right?

But the goal was—this was the intention was the story was that I had a student and she was a young little girl. Her parents went to pretty much a library, and she asked me a question, and that question was like, 'Am I dumb?' And what her parents bought for her was Coding for Dummies. And she internalized it. And it was kind of pretty sad for me because I was the teacher to figure out there were not many learning materials. And this was in pretty much the tech space. And in itself, this was kind of like the book that she got. So I started thinking and working and started literally just figuring out like, okay, what could I do to help out like even our younger generation, our older generation, or even maybe your generation? So what happened was I started doing like Medium blogs, and the company was called CodeWithCorgis, and it was pretty much just like comic books, just materials, and it really helped out in the beginning. It was more for data, it was for interviews, it was trying to set up your Git, it was like maybe data analytics interview questions. So I started doing that first, and then it started getting some traffic.

And then I started doing like Instagram and trying to do like a lot of other things. So it made me figure out like I started becoming more of like a comic book artist than a developer, and started figuring out like, well, these were all animated, let's see how people got in, right? So I was trying to distinguish and make a brand. And then started YouTube, and it was just all animated. So I didn't want to show like maybe tutorials about myself. I like my privacy. I just wanted just to make some character kind of like a beginning of like what Disney started, right? And then I started going crazy and like two years ago, I was like maybe I do not want to show my face, and maybe I would go back crazy and start building a giant suit like Iron Man, which was totally—I was probably crazy enough to think about it. So I actually thought of 3D printing this giant suit, which is what you saw in the beginning. And also, if you never noticed, there's like the curly brackets and also a parenthesis butt. And it got really crazy as well because then after that I started using it for tech conferences and actually going through companies. This is me, and I'm in that suit, it's pretty big. The head is like six feet and it has a vent, and me fighting a robot. Which that is a startup company that is doing a robotic arm and robotic movement. So it was kind of very interesting that people would attach to something that's very unnatural, and a mascot suit is pretty cool too in sports, in games, even if you're maybe an anime fan cosplaying. So it was actually attractive in that. And the goal was to wear this corgi suit and teach kids or any adult stuff. Maybe now I am going to wear this to teach Web3.

So all that was a journey in itself, and it was trying to shout out and say, 'Am I significant?' and maybe all of those things were all maybe failures, but it actually gave me a better skill set than I had today. And now I'm creating like 0xCorigis, which was kind of like a Duolingo, a CryptoZombies if you ever played that, and a—this is a really good book of one of my Manga Guide to Databases. If you do not like text, this is a picture book that will help you out to learn databases. My goal is to make a manga guide for Web3, to be like a comic book artist, which I wasn't intended. And if you ever notice my logo sigil, there's a curly bracket. So what's interesting is a lot of female developers or even college students or anyone in tech will see the curly brackets, but any normie that's not tech will just see the corgi. And that became a really interesting branding opportunity.

Which I made CodeWithCorgis, but people in Web3 will know like my sigil, and they will never see my face. So they never knew me. So we had—I went to hackathons, they knew CodeWithCorgis and they used it as college learning materials, which was pretty awestruck because I never thought like people used me. So that was pretty interesting as well. So then I started expanding and figured out that maybe I should make a mobile app to get more traffic. So the goal was to build this mobile application, it could be also web, and these are kind of like the goal was to defeat imposter syndrome and make like a video game. So kind of like that Duolingo style but with Web3 stuff where you can actually build in remote, right? So can I pretty much make an identity—so the goal was to make an identity to a programming language and then make it into an adventure game or story. So we had like all these characters we grew up with, or maybe comic books that you grew up with, can we do that with programming?

So for example, like I had this idea like maybe make every character, every programming language a character. So like this Python, you just give it some eyes and legs and then give it a name and then maybe make it alive and then it'd be pretty cool. And then actually a lot of students love that. And they wanted to make sure that like, oh, I—they could see the symbol but they have some character. So I wanted to create some characters within things. Like for example, maybe Git. Or if you're a Rust fan, Rustaceans also. So that's pretty interesting in itself in the space. So the goal was to make like learning programming fast but also other Web3 technologies, which got a lot of traffic. And the thing was to make understand like terms, so maybe doing like quizzes or puzzle games or even just learning terminology in some way or some form. And then it can go something like maybe an Urban Dictionary. So it got to something like maybe asking like what is an airdrop and how do you use it? So actually for your parents or your kids or your young ones, they might be able to say it in a sentence. And then maybe get some rewards or maybe get some learning for your own benefit, right?

Kind of like the goal was to make like a small demo. And I wanted to contribute to Developer DAO too and make like a—kind of like a corgi skin or corgi character in itself. So like for example, this is going to be the app itself. You can see here this is the demonstration. The goal was to defeat imposter syndrome which maybe everyone has. And what it does is just to make sure it's more cute and it's not like super scary for a lot of people, right? So with this, you can actually see all of the terminologies and you can actually change and connect your wallet. And with this in itself, you can connect your wallet or if you're just not—you could even enter your wallet if needed. And what's nice is you can choose any from your wallet what character. So if you have like a Bored Ape, they can be your guide or that NFT will teach you Web3 if you know it. For those who already know it, they probably have NFTs. But for those who don't, they could probably have custom like their own avatar and they will be the character of their story. So like for example, my favorite one is like if I have Developer DAO, I can use that and get a Developer DAO corgi as well. And we wanted to also maybe do partnerships with other companies and maybe have like specific skins for the corgi itself and actually promote it more later down the road. But the goal was to make like games, mini games in itself like in comic book style. So like for example, like if you're learning about MetaMask, it will try to onboard you what it is without having set up on your mobile phone. And I try to test it with like a lot of students. So you can see here, you can get it wrong and you can get it right. So these quizzes will actually just be a lot of mini puzzle games just like Duolingo. So that's kind of the goal itself. And then later on we'll have things like a shop, a comic book, maybe a browser where you can integrate and maybe it could be within the browser could be like a Microsoft Clippy to onboard you to set up stuff if needed. But we wanted to make sure that like the app is designed really well and then make sure that it actually shows a story more than just to understand these topics, which could be extremely hard for a lot of people. So that's kind of the goal of this demo itself. If you want to learn more, you can follow us on 0xCorigis.xyz to get the beta or early access, we'll give you TestFlight and we'll try to make sure you could break it so we can fix it. Or if not, you could also follow us on like @0xCorigis, @CodeWithCorgis, or @DevNTellXYZ.

Good stuff, good stuff. Yeah. So I think that's all I have in itself going through. So that was wonderful. Got to say I love all the animations that you're doing there and I think it's really cute and a different way of going about teaching folks, especially it seems like your main target audience is the non-technical folks. I think that's a great way to kind of go about things and test experiments, see what sticks. And I got to ask, do you have a corgi? Like—

That's a good question. I used to. So the—it was actually that was a good one. It was either buying a giant mascot suit or buying another corgi. And then I think I chose the last—I chose the giant corgi suit because I think it was—I think teaching a real corgi how to code would be totally different. I wouldn't be making a company at that time. So yeah, so I did use to have a corgi itself, yes.

Nice, nice. And when—when did you kind of decide, 'Yeah, I want to do this full-time. I want to put all my concentration into this.' Is it fairly recent or?

Yeah, it was fairly recent. There was a lot of those experiments like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and I working as like I wanted to make my side hustle a little bit more like fully invested. And probably the best way was maybe going through hackathons and figured out like, do people even like it? And the thing that was interesting with the story was there was—and Narb you were there, we—I went to Graph Day and then I presented my project and that was—but what was interesting was a person like two people, they didn't know what 0xCorigis was, but they knew my old company called CodeWithCorgis and they didn't know my face but they knew the symbol. And these were developer advocates in Web3 that transitioned from Web2 to Web3, and they were all female engineers. And they loved it. And they were like, they were using it amongst their friends. They just—but it was the demographic for me was like, oh, people use me and they used it for like kind of college materials. So that was kind of like awestruck of like, people use this? So then that was the pivot point where I actually had to just like double down and work on this full-time and test.

Excellent. Yeah, yeah. I remember that. You were talking about it when we were at Graph Day, yeah. This is wonderful to see it come this far. Yeah. Anyone in the crowd have any questions for Drew?

Yeah, I have one. I wanted to ask about like you mentioned on the partnership side, the like down the line you were hoping to get like characters also onboarded from from different partner DAOs, partner projects. Could you maybe walk me through your thought process on that a bit more? Like what kind of characters would you like to have onboarded, what kind of DAOs would you ideally want to partner with?

Yeah. So like for example, like I would like I for me some people came up to me and gave me feedback and like some partners would have been like like Buildspace, if everyone knows that, but they're not a DAO but they're like a community itself. And then maybe pretty much marketing myself to like other female-oriented types of pretty much DAOs as well because people want something a little bit more accessible. So in my area locally there is like Blockchain Babes and they are they're kind of like trying to create like a DAO itself. And then making those types of characters. And that would be more like on their end like, do you want a corgi story? Like I've it's learned how to make like different types of corgis and it might be like a Care Bears style, but it could be also up to them like what kind of character defines them. Or if they have like an NFT, like can I put like maybe a corgi with the shirt of that? Like just like how you buy merch physically, it's the same way just making a different skin. And then that's up to them of how they partner. I just really wanted to actually also expand on that. They could actually we could actually make comics for their learning materials and then they could also we could maybe split the proceeds too. It's pretty open-ended, I'm just figuring out like will this work? And does that actually give more traffic or marketing to them or as well as for me too? The goal was actually it's funny, I wasn't expecting to do DAOs. I was going to be supposed to go to tech conferences and just like how esports works to where you have like patches and people have like sponsors. I was going to have like people put in their stickers on that corgi and then it will be just like self-promotion in itself. So that could have worked too physically but also maybe virtually too.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be literally DAOs. You could just say like, 'Drew, I want to partner. I'll put your freaking NFT on my corgi and then just do that and then I'll just do a Twitch stream and then you could just be endorsed.' Maybe get followers just like how people cosplay for anime. It's pretty much the same for me. Like it doesn't have to be the organization level. It could be individual level too. Your personal identity. Like if I say Narb, I'm going to put your face on my corgi would you be offended?

No, let's do it, baby. Let's do it. Right. Or even like I could say I know Web3 like Developer DAO has their own sweaters. I could just wear that sweater in a corgi suit and just endorse them, right? It's kind of the reason why I got that corgi suit.

Awesome. Thanks for that. Yeah.

We got a couple questions in the chat. Javi asks, 'All the animations are so, so good. The corgis, also the Bored Ape. Are you an artist/animator too?'

Oh no. That is—I am a self-taught—I'll give you an example like I should have put the old design, but I did not and was not an animator or a designer. I just learned it. It took a while. Those many failures, and actually doing Instagram so many times and just trying to make like those cards just gave me more practice and just made my animation a lot faster. Like my first one was like an hour and then I started figuring out like if you think of it programmatically it's like, oh, I can try to increase the speed. And then once you do a lot of assets, you could figure out like this is how like video games work. Like if you compare like League of Legends and Riot, other games, they had assets already built. So you just start spanning and changing it and that's how they became performant. So I took a playbook on like video games as well. I even look at like low-tech, like if you look at how like video games changed, like if you look at like the three models of like Tomb Raider, it's insane. They just kept improving. So I started just figuring out like a faster performant way to make my animations. And the animations that I did in my app is not—they're not—like I have two types of ways to animate GIFs, which is pretty cool. And then also those animations are that are on the app are very performant. They're just like binary files. So it's really seamless. What we wanted to make something very interactive.

So if you want to also know about the app, it's not Swift or Android or even React Native, it's using Flutter because I just wanted to use the performance. So I had to learn that too, which was kind of hard. So yeah. Any other questions? I'm more of like a kind of like a conversation. I like questions so I can answer the best.

Yeah, likewise. There's a couple more in the chat. Pardon me if I mispronounce your name, Rocio Gonzalez Torall asks, 'Does the corgi have a name? Your mascot?'

Oh yeah. Yeah. The corgi has a LinkedIn, but it's called—don't—yeah, it's called Cody with a K. K-O-D-Y. Cody the corgi.

Nice, beauty. Yeah. And the other one, Wickist asks, 'Do you partner with companies that take care of dogs? Or have you thought about it?'

Oh yeah, the intention was the intention was to be like there's two biggest—like that's the reason why I got this mascot suit was I wanted to go to a really big convention like Corgi Con. And then also I wanted to also give back too. So like I'll maybe I'll think of like oh all most of the proceeds will go to like women in tech because that's like our it was crazy because I looked at the data, it was like a lot of females used up loved the idea. A lot of our users are all female. And then also like a lot of people who use us was also dog owners. They just love corgis or they love dogs. So that was like, okay, dogs, females, so maybe when we ship the app we would just have all some of the proceeds go to like maybe a female DAO or women in tech or girls who code and then also maybe a shelter to help I don't know, there's actually a shelter for like these corgis that have butt dysplasia and they have like they have like wheels. So it's pretty interesting maybe it goes to those donations goes through. And then also yes, I was aware of Cody K-O-D-Y, but that's why the name was with a Y for me. So I had to think of every single possibility of tech and also dogs, which is kind of very interesting as well. Good questions. Your idea probably leaks to non-Web3. Yeah, it does, but it doesn't give the hype and impact. A lot of times I did Web2 didn't get a lot of traffic. But in Web3 it started becoming more boom and I did a test. I have like my CodeWithCorgis Twitter account which has all Web2 stuff, compared to 0xCorigis the amount of data, a lot of people are more interested because the learning materials in Web3 are not finalized, but it's super saturated in Web2 so I had to pivot. Yeah and I track a lot of corgi owners as well and and that also could be partnering maybe with other coins that are kind of maybe dog-based. But yeah, but I'm more open to those types of questions too.

And if you're interested in in partnerships, just let me know. I'm pretty open-ended and I can try to figure out like what is a good way for like even promoting individuals or DAOs. So it's that's up to you in itself. And if you want a custom comic, let me know because then I I pretty much self-taught so I wanted to be like a manga artist or an anime artist. So maybe in the future I might have an anime. Yeah, like a Hello Kitty style thing or it could be like a Gundam. So and then yeah.

Great stuff man. Yeah. I believe there was one other question. 'Any plans to shift this to a website from your mobile-first approach?'

Yeah, so I'm going to ship it as well. We're still making it and I did have a good idea and I wondered if people will give me feedback is that I know a lot of times you might have websites or products that you don't want to onboard your users. So the goal would be in the website we're trying to build like a soft I don't know, like a corgi as a service and we wanted to do embeddable comic books and maybe their NFTs maybe in like maybe Arweave or like IPFS, but it would be like an iframe where you can put it kind of like on your site and it could be an interactive I would say it's like an interactive ad but it will onboard you to like maybe setting up your MetaMask. So and then a good question, 'Do you have a team that helps you create those that content?' It's just me. I say 'we' a lot, but it's just me doing all that stuff. So I did design, code, build, ship. It was kind of just a learning time. I do have three consultants and they just tell me like what's cool and they're non-technical so they were just saying like they were telling me what I really needed to hear because they wanted to be in this space but they just felt that they did were not good enough. And they just felt like they were like, well, this is overwhelming, why am I here? So they wanted something like they wanted to use. Some of them were musicians, some of them were like from non-technical. One was a carpenter. Yeah, so in itself. So all this stuff was just for them. But then that could diverge to your mom, dad, family, friends in this space.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, I do have a TikTok. It's been a while, so it's still Web2 and I'm changing maybe to a Web3 as well. So look try to look forward on my TikToks as well or Instagram. They're very intuitive. They took a lot of time. So they're high quality too. Beauty. Looking forward to it. We have a couple minutes left. Any final questions for Drew in the crowd? Going once, going twice, sold. Yeah. My pleasure, my pleasure man. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. This was a very engaging, wonderful discussion we had here and it's awesome to see all the hard work that you poured in starting to pay off and going to pay off even further in my mind. And what's the best way for for people to to follow your progress? I know you mentioned a Twitter handle, maybe want to mention it again.

I'll share my screen and then this is kind of like the best way to follow me. If you need to, you can follow me just on @0xCorigis or on I think Twitter in itself. So if you go to @0xCorigis or if you're on my Web2 one, @CodeWithCorgis is as well. I have all social media in CodeWithCorgis in itself, but Twitter if you want to see the progress of the app it would be @0xCorigis and I usually post like all my updates if you want to follow as well. And then also we will probably maybe later like I will bring that corgi suit to wherever nearest you, right? So you can actually see it. It's pretty shocking for a lot of people because it's it's huge. Yeah, it took a lot of time to build. Oh you built it yourself? Oh wow. Yeah, yeah it was through I did the design and then figured out 3D printing a large head was pretty gutsy. And then actually the felt and all this stuff. And so so I hope everyone enjoys that. So if not you could meet me live in maybe in any Web3 conference, but I trying to trying to figure out and build this app so I can give it to my students and also like maybe your mom or dad or your brother or sister. So dope. LFG. LFG.

Take care everyone. Thank you man. Great stuff man. Yeah. and with that I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday or weekend wherever maybe be and maybe some people have a long weekend so please do take the time to recharge those batteries, relax, hang out, maybe touch some grass as they say. But yeah, what a way to kick off Season One of DevNTell. Love it. And stay tuned. I will be dropping a link in the chat here as well as the DevNTell chat as well to claim your brand spankin' new POAPs for Season One. And Drew I'll be sharing with you a special kudos for being a presenter here today. My pleasure, my pleasure. All right gang, and with that I will stop the recording.